Italy: Employment, GDP to fall in south 2012-2015, OBI says

OBI Director General Corvino say youth must take up challenge

(ANSAMed) - SORRENTO, JULY 10 - Italy's gross domestic
product (GDP) will grow by a modest 0.8-0.9% in its central and
northeastern regions in the 2012-2015 period, while in the
northwest the economy will be virtually static, with 0.2% annual
growth, and the south's GDP will drop by 0.4% a year, according
to forecasts by the Observatory of Banks Enterprises of Economy
and Finance (OBI) released on Tuesday.
The findings were released by experts at this year's
Sorrento Meeting of 250 economists, academics, bankers,
researchers and representatives of public and private
institutions, as well as Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebati,
and Moroccan feminist writer and psychiatrist, Rita El Khayat.

Italy's youth will be particularly hard hit in the next
three years, with 0.3% decline in the number of people under 25
in work in the South, compared to modest rises in employment in
Italy overall (+0.3%), in central Italy (+0.5%), in the
northeast (+0.7%) and in the northwest (+0.4%).
If these projections come true, southerners will make up
25.5% of the employed labor force by the end of the 2005-2015
decade, down from 27.6% at the start of it, according to OBI.

The gradual concentration of jobs in Italy's four
north-eastern regions will affect internal migration as well as
the flow of people from Eastern Europe, Africa, and the
Mediterranean, OBI experts said.

''The data confirms the need for an overall transformation
of European and Mediterranean economic, social and political
systems,'' OBI Director General Antonio Corvino said.
''We must admit that the economic, social and political
thinking of the past few decades has been flattened by
conformism. It has lost its potential for critical analysis''.

This change of worldview, Corvino said, is essential to
avoid ''the deterioration of civil society, the dangerous drift
towards criminality, the risk of clashes between Mediterranean
cultures, and the sacrifice of entire generations of young
people''.

Corvino called on Sorrento Meeting participants, on society
at large, and on youth to take up the intellectual challenge
posed by the current situation, by emulating the likes of
Federico Caffe', John Kenneth Galbraith and Albert Camus.
In particular, he invited young people to ''overcome the
'single thought' critique of neoliberalism in order to face the
new social and economic challenges''.

Ebati and El Khayat called for gender equality and the
defense of women's rights as fundamental conditions for
overcoming the current crisis, especially in the many countries,
from East to West, where the road to freedom and an even playing
field for both men and women is still a long one. (ANSAMed).